Onivim 2 – A retro-futuristic modal editor | Hacker News Reader

Onivim 2 – A retro-futuristic modal editor

onivim.io

89 pointsphilonoist75 comments

Onivim 2 is a retro-futuristic modal editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27627275 - June 2021 (132 comments)

This seems to pop from time to time, see my previous comment from nearly 3.5 months ago. Nothing has changed. No releases.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27655998

I'd rather stick to Neovim with support for LSP (language server protocol) and DAP (debug adapter protocol). See a demo here: https://youtu.be/CcgO_CV3iDo

I agree with this. This is my setup.

However, I like tinkering with my dev environment quite a lot to make it exactly how I want it. I imagine the target market of Onivim is those users who don't want to tinker quite as much.

One good thing about about Neovim is that it forces vim to keep up. I don't really stay up to date, but I think Vim 8 was mostly updates to keep on par with Neovim.

It's a bit more friendly than that (according to TJ DeVries from the Neovim team). It's more like both teams bouncing ideas off of one another and inspiring each other. And that can result in one release or another just looking like implementing features from the other project.

yup same here

Yup, Neovim has become very interesting again due to LSP. Still requires quite a bit of config though.

For anyone interested there's also vscode-neovim [1] if you like what VSCode comes with out of the box but want a full-on nvim instance interpreting your keystrokes.

I'm currently using a combination of terminal nvim and this vscode plugin depending on language.

[1]: https://github.com/asvetliakov/vscode-neovim

VSCode Neovim looks extremely interesting, does it work well? Is it easy to set up?

Works reasonably well. Multi-cursor/renaming is not as good as VSCodeVim. On the plus side, you have the full set of vim commands available to you such as`:norm`.

I've never used multi-cursors, so I don't think I'll miss them. On the other hand, whenever I want to type Vim commands and the editor doesn't want to, it always jars me.

I will give this a shot, thanks!

The project has run out of funds: https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/3811#issuecomment-9103....

Considering how many people are annoyed by the trend of Electron everywhere, it's a bit sad to see an ambitious native editor like this unable to secure funding.

Vast majority of the general users of Electron apps don't know what Electron is. Neither whether the apps use it. It's better to have an official support through electron than to have none.

Cool, but vim-for-money? When there's normal vim and neovim and vscode and evil-emacs? I think that text editors, even with fancy chrome are a pretty busy market with lots of good free-beer offerings.

True, but for a full time professional user, even "a little better for me" can be worth a lot of money.

Given how free the alternatives are, I think I'm paying a lot for Sublime, but given how much I like and use it ... it's a small price to pay.

You can build it yourself. The source is on github and the build instructions are pretty easy.

That's cool too. Of course I can also build those other ones myself (except all the nonfree vscode plugins that make it good of course). And if I understand correctly, the Free Software repo is promised to be just 18 months behind the commercially licensed product. This is all great, and makes it better (in my opinion) than stuff like Sublime or whatever.

Competing with something that's even more free though? That's going to be a challenge, and something would definitely have put me off of starting a business to sell this product.

I didn't know the source code was lagging. Thanks for pointing it out.

I agree with you anyway. I checked it out, it seems neat enough, but I'm happy to be going back to emacs :)

I can't view their patreon without creating a user, but I am curious about what their pricing is and I assume it is listed there.

Anyone got the inside scoop?

Something weird is going on. They used to also sell licenses on the website, but it disappeared. Now they have a sold out $5 tier on Patreon, unless you visit the site's direct link? It's just odd.

e: Status update from project lead as of 2021-09-01: https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/3811#issuecomment-9103....

> Some things I've been thinking about:

> I'd like to re-license the source code to MIT. This will happen soon (ie, for 0.5.8). It'd be great to make it easier to contribute the project, and I know the current license is a potential blocker. I'll need development help more now than ever. > I plan on turning off Patreon shortly - I can't justify keeping it active if I'm not able to work full-time. (I plan on doing something similar to when I transitioned from Onivim v1 -> Onivim v2 - convert all current patrons to a lifetime license).

So that's why you can't buy a license anymore ? I had been hesitating for a long time, the only thing I'd want from onivim is an easy to use debugger for php/node like the on vscode has. With easy to move into variables and inspect content with the mouse, stopping the debugger, etc.

Every time I tried that with vim or neovim I can't get over the buffer management and keyboard navigation thing and generally get a lot of errors. I usually manage to see the value of a variable and then it all crumbles down in error messages. Probably pebcak but still :/.

> Supporter

> €4.50 per month (sold out!)

> Thank you for your monthly support of Onivim 2!

> This tier gets:

> - Access to downloadable builds

> - Month-to-month commercial use license

This information was not on the donation page, so I went with 1 buck. Never used Patreon before and I now don't know how to change my donation.

This is a pretty bad onboarding. I'm willing to pay, at least for a month, just to try this, but it is ... hard.

edit: I found it, upped my donation to 5€, still can't download. Somethings broken here.

I didn't try it. But I surfed the website and watched the animations.

I am using stock Neovim on the console. For completion I switched to nvim-cmp https://github.com/hrsh7th/nvim-cmp. Onivim also provides (based on the screencasts) completion. Do they leverage their own coded completion engine or are they using nvim-plugins and only render the UI over this completion?

My point is there will always be an impedance mismatch between functionality provided by plugins compared to what a UI provider thinks has to be coded in their respective implementation.

Seems that the idea is to implement vscode APIs and use the vscode plugin host and backend system for extensibility.

Why not just write a Vim plugin for VSCode then though? Which already exists.

Performance

It's on the homepage - they aim to support the full VS Code extensions API and that is how they power language features like completion.

I've been keeping an eye on onivim for a long time and think it has a lot of potential. Last time I tried it it still had too many rough edges to try and use as a daily driver, though.

Neither.

> Onivim is capable of loading VSCode extensions

I have a onivim2 licence and thus try it from time to time. Speed etc is impressive. Currently I think it is about getting the last 20% done and development has been slowing down a bit. Really hope this get done. I still cannot really get a grasp on how viml and vscode extensions might interplay. It is btw interesting to note that onivim 1 was neovim but the author decided that it was better to wrap the vim source code.

Why do modern editors have minimaps now? Do people actually find them useful?

I personally like them for resolving merge conflicts by hand. It really helps just clicking on a section in blueish to instantly jump to a conflict in large-ish files.

This can be done by colorbands on the scrollbar though

I agree, it's a waste of screen estate and focus estate, I can't see the benefit of a minimap. I usually use imenu in Emacs so any definition is 0.1s away with a keypress

I don't tend to find horizontal screen estate to be all that useful, unless A). You have your editor massively zoomed in or B). your lines are (subjectively) too long

I dont find them massively useful, but its nice to have

I’ve seen people using banner style comments visible in the minimap. That is almost useful. But not really.

In VSCode you can make it narrow and replace the scrollbar with it, it looks cool :-p

just tried and i think i like it.

Genuine question: if it looks so much like VSCode and it behaves close to VSCode + VIm extension, and it supports VSCode extensions... what is the audience and/or use case?

Not a big fan of Microsoft.. but VSCode is good. It's actually really fast so even in terms of performance I'm not sure what is to be gained?

Vim has that one advantage is I can drop a 10 GB SQL file in it and it'll work somehow. But that's a really niche use case.

ps: I do wish there was the ONE... I'm still alt-tabbing between Sublime Text, VSCode AND MacVim :)

They selling points:

  Vim like

  VsCode Extension

  Not an electron app

Btw, I'm not try it yet.

In what sense is "retro-futuristic"? Colour scheme?

I think vim is the retro part...

Sorry, I was just joking :-)

I find funny that they label modal editing, or vim compatibility, or whatever they want to achieve as a retro thing.

Well, it is retro for 99% of the population and fashion is a mass market thing.

I think they're trying to be a bit too clever, with vim being the retro part and "futuristic" being used to signify contemporary/modern/IDE-ish.

Not really how retrofuturism actually works, as that would imply that a part of the editor would be how people in the past imagined the future to be. Which would be an interesting concept, but I'm not aware of any kind of editing interface like that. Too menial for pop culture. Retro-futuristic image manipulation would be in Blade Runner, but text editing?

Maybe the Tron 2 quasi-Emacs ;)

https://www.robscanlon.com/encom-boardroom/

https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui

This looks cool - I hope that the model of "pay for binaries but free to compile yourself" works out even without making the build process too convoluted.

>Commercial use requires the purchase of a license.

However it has a "time delay dual" licence so eventually everything becomes MIT.

I'm using Vim and VSCode+Vim side by side. They both work well. Though the Onivim sounds cool, it's unclear to me how they would fit in the spectrum.

Looks like the last release was in April? It's something I'd be interested in paying for, but only if it's being actively developed?

The project is acively developed, you can have a look at its repository: https://github.com/onivim/oni2/

I think they are doing quite a good job, the editor is blazing fast and you can already use almost seamlessly many VScode plugins. It is clearly still a developer preview, with a number of rough edges, but the devs are very reactive on the issues and on the discord channel.

I bought it in the very early days to support the project. I still cannot use it as my main editor, but I have been using it more and more recently (I am using the nightly version).

Does it support Live Share?

I don’t know. What is live share?

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/

I see, I don’t know but its license is pretty clear in saying that you cannot use it outside of Microsoft stuff: “You may install and use any number of copies of the software to use solely with Microsoft Visual Studio family of products.”

You can see here what will work and what not: https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/1058

Finally, an editor that combines the intuitiveness of vim with the efficiency of Electron! Just what I wanted!

It's not Electron, it's their own native UI framework, Revery. This is mentioned up front on the linked site.

From the linked Revery UI framework they use:

> if your app looks or behaves differently on another platform, that's a bug! As a consequence, Revery is like flutter in that it does not use native widgets.

No native widgets is a hard pass. One of the biggest advantages of native code is using native widgets, that look, feel and function as all other widgets om that platform. Doing native code but rolling your own widgets is missing the point completely.

Apps should look and behave differently on different platforms, they should look and behave like native apps for that platform. Why would I care if an app looks the same on Windows, macOS and Linux when I'm not using all those OSes at the same time ? This feels like a benefit for the developer, not the end-user.

Unfortunately no one gives a shit about native UI. Look at apps like Spotify and other Electron apps

Developers don't give a shit (or more likely: their managers who want to save a buck) user do but have little choice.

> Why would I care if an app looks the same on Windows, macOS and Linux when I'm not using all those OSes at the same time ?

Sometimes you do switch, and having everything be the same in your editor is nice. I normally work in linux on a desktop and have a windows machine due to corporate policy. Because of COVID, I started working from home on my laptop and VNC'ed into my linux machine to do work. It worked fine until my ISP decided to be shit, so out of frustration I just switched to developing on windows. Since I was using IntelliJ, I just exported my settings from Linux, imported to windows and everything just worked and looked the same.

In theory, I kind of agree with you. But in practice, having a consistent experience across all OS'es is nice. The ship has sailed anyway, nothing looks consistent across different applications on the same platform anyway. Might as well have applications be consistent across different platforms instead.

>combining the modal ergonomics of Vim, the quick and responsive feel of a native app

but, but... vim is a native app?

Quiet, heretic! Who let this one in here to disrupt the omnicogitations of the vimniarchs!?

It is because this is Onivim version 2. The first version was based on VScode, which was not native.

You also didn't quote the important part. It should reads like this

> the quick and responsive feel of a native app, and the vast extension ecosystem of VS Code.

Essentially, you are in the market for onivim if

- You like vim

- You hate the sluggishness of VSCode

- Your workflow depends on specific VSCode extensions (may be because all your teammates use VSCode?)

Thanks for share this answers. Very interesting and useful for my case.

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I made a joke to a colleague about 20 years ago that they’d rewrite vim in JavaScript one day.

It’s no longer funny.

Edit: comment retracted. I am an idiot. Left here because I’m not a revisionist.

It's not written in JavaScript.

Unlike vim, this is not open source.

I always have to laugh when someone uses the words "ergonomics" and "vim" in the same sentence...

Modal editors are mostly one key at a time. That is much easier to 'ergonomize' than chords, more so if you are not using a US keyboard.

A misguided laugh?

Vim is highly ergnomic for the task it was made to do. Whether it was designed as such or it was a happy accident is orthogonal.

It's ergonomic once you have memorized all the required keystrokes, but the discoverability of the UI for new users is... I can't even say bad, more like non-existent. Ok, maybe it's debatable if you can call that "ergonomics"...

If this is in the github editor, or a new jupyter frontend, that would be cool. An app replaced my neovim setup? No thanks.

Not sure I like VS Code enough to cop to pay for it rather than just continuing into invest into Jetbrains. Their vik plugins blow VSC out of the water.

This seems pointless. You can have a modern UI for neovim, they literally have a section on their github page showing you the alternatives. Pick Rust, not electron, and you won't have to do any funky config stuff.

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